1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to electronic health records. More specifically, the present invention relates to a methods and apparatus for distributing electronic health records with a portable electronic storage device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic data is pervasive; electronic data records have been created to capture details about almost any conceivable transaction or event. Medical records, for example, contain various data about patients, including medical history data, test data, medication data, etc. Some records may be of critical importance (e.g., a record of an allergy to medication) while other records may be much less significant (e.g., records of a healed injury). Electronic medical records (EMRs) have become a vital resource for doctors, researchers, laboratories, insurance providers, and claims-processors, etc.
One of the problems created by the proliferation of data is the management and accessibility of the data. Currently, EMR's are often stored by multiple unrelated entities, none of which are specialized in providing data storage or retrieval services. For example, a health care provider may maintain an internal set of electronic records for individual patients treated by the provider. Similarly, a pharmacist may maintain records for prescriptions dispensed to a patient at a particular location or pharmacy chain. Another health care provider, however, will not normally have on-demand access to the records of either. As illustrated by even this simple example, the electronic medical records related to a patient may be spread across many entities, and each entity is often limited to accessing EMRs created by that particular entity.
Providing access to a complete collection of electronic medical records from this widely distributed data has proven to be very difficult. One proposed solution for creating a comprehensive EMR system involves creating a data federation. In such a federation, the electronic medical records related to a particular patient may be maintained at individual organizations (e.g., the healthcare provider, pharmacist, clinic, etc.), or at a number of repositories established to consolidate some EMR data. For example, the Cross Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) profile (defined by the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) organization) is representative of a federated model. The XDS profile describes a clinical domain where institutions that join the domain share electronic medical records with one another. The clinical domain may include one to many data repositories storing electronic medical records.
Such models will typically rely on some form of federated query or retrieval operation when a request is made to view electronic health records for a given patient. That is, federated systems may respond to an EMR data request by (i) identifying each node that may include EMR data for the patient, and (ii) attempting to retrieve the relevant EMR data from each such provider node. Unfortunately, identifying each node that may include EMR data for the patient may be an imprecise process, and may be error prone. Additionally, if the patient previously received care at a facility outside the federation, the results of a federated query may not contain any record of the medical data generated during this care.
Furthermore, during emergency situations, doctors in a treatment center must quickly make life and death decisions. The medical history of a patient, including known allergies and drug interactions may play a large role in these decisions. If the patient has never before received medical care at the particular treatment center, the doctor may not have quick access to the patient's relevant medical history, and performing a comprehensive federated query to locate the necessary medical records may be a time consuming and, as previously described, imprecise process.
Accordingly, what is needed is a versatile method and system for distributing a user's medical data and locations of where further medical data may be found.